Meg Waite Clayton | In Defense of Happy Endings

Happiness is boring,” and “Riding off into the sunset is not true,” insisted a Noted Author at a symposium I attended earlier this month on the proposition that happiness simply cannot make good literature. And as I resisted – just barely – the urge to pull Sense and Sensibility from my backpack, he lobbed up this comment about Austen unprompted: She is “done for” because we’ve entered “a divorce culture.” One can no longer rely on one’s mate.

I flipped to the back of the journal in which I was taking notes: Pfhew, the photo of my husband of twenty years was still there.

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